Abstract
This chapter presents the first of seven studies that evaluate lexical facility as a second language (L2) vocabulary construct. Study 1 examines the sensitivity of the lexical facility measures to differences in three university English populations, and a preuniversity group of L2 English students in a university language program, L2 university students, and first language (L1) university students. The sensitivity of the three measures (vocabulary size, mean recognition speed, and recognition speed consistency) to group differences is examined for each measure individually and as composites. Construct validity is also established by comparing performance across frequency levels.
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Notes
- 1.
The false-alarm data depart markedly from a normal distribution, as some participants had few-to-none false alarms. A Kruskal–Wallis test was run to test for the equality of the group false-alarm means. There was a significant difference between the groups, χ 2 = 18.18, p < .001, η 2 = .82. Follow-up Mann–Whitney tests showed that the difference between the preuniversity and L2 university groups was significant at U = 289.50, p < .001, d = .94 (Lenhard and Lenhard 2014).
- 2.
The use of a multivariate ANOVA (MANOVA) is motivated in conceptual terms, as the three measures are all assumed to be elements of the lexical facility construct. However, the data departed significantly from a key assumption for the test, namely that of homogeneity of variance/covariance, and so the MANOVA procedure was not done. Alternatively, five univariate ANOVAs are carried out to compare the effect of the three individual measures with each other and with the two composite measures of interest, VKsize_mnRT and VKsize_mnRT_CV.
- 3.
Boxplot inspections used throughout the book assume outliers to be values 1.5 box lengths from the edge of the box.
- 4.
Two of these were the VKsize scores for the L2 university (p < .005) and L1 university groups (p < .02), both showing a tendency to higher scores, as reflected in the moderately negative skew. The others were the CV score for the L2 university group (p < .02) and the composite VKsize_mnRT score for the L1 university group (p = .008).
- 5.
A central aim in the empirical research presented in these chapters is to demonstrate that the measures of processing skill (mnRT and CV), combined with VKsize, will result in a more sensitive measure of proficiency differences than the VKsize measure alone. This question is particularly conducive to treatment in a regression format, where the effect of the individual measures on group differences can be sequentially analyzed and quantified. A candidate technique for the current study is the ordinal logistic regression; the MANOVA-related discriminant analysis is another (Field 2009). The procedure can be used to predict an ordinal (categorical) variable, as in proficiency group membership, given one or more independent variables—in this case, the three lexical facility measures. This is the same logic as standard multiple or hierarchical regression, but the criterion is an ordered category instead of a continuous variable. An ordinal logistic regression was tried with these data, but the assumptions were not met, particularly that of proportional odds.
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Harrington, M. (2018). Lexical Facility as an Index of L2 Proficiency. In: Lexical Facility. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-37262-8_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-37262-8_6
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